Artificial intelligence has become a part of everyday conversation, often with advice like, "You just have to learn how to prompt it." While that advice holds some truth, it misses a deeper layer of what makes AI truly effective. Recently, a term has started to gain traction among AI researchers and practitioners: context engineering. This concept might be the key to unlocking AI’s full potential, especially for those working with automation and intelligent agents. I’ve spent

By Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence | Theoretical Physics Research There's a number in physics that nobody likes to talk about at dinner. It's 10¹²⁰. A 1 followed by 120 zeroes. That's the ratio between what quantum field theory predicts the vacuum energy of the universe should be, and what we actually observe. It's not a small rounding error. It's not an off-by-a-few-percent calibration issue. It's the largest known discrepancy between theory and observation in the history

By Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence Research Lab | April 2026 Independent theoretical physics research from Mitchell, South Dakota. No institution. No permission slip. Just the work. The Question Nobody's Asking Quite Right Physics has two great theories. Both are spectacularly successful. Both are almost certainly incomplete. Quantum mechanics rules the subatomic world with brutal precision. General relativity bends space and time across galactic scales. They work beautifu

Urea has nearly doubled in four months. Here’s why it’s not going back down — and the five moves precision agriculture makes possible right now. By Timm Johnson, Owner — Dakota Intelligence | Mitchell, South Dakota | April 2026 Spring 2026 opened with a number that gets harder to ignore every time you look at it: $800 per ton for urea. In late 2025, that same ton cost around $350. A near-doubling in under four months — not because of a bad harvest, not because of drou

DAKOTA INTELLIGENCE Automate South Dakota LOCAL-FIRST AI Taking Back Your Machine A Plain-Language Guide & Technical Proof of Concept Timm Johnson | Dakota Intelligence Mitchell, South Dakota | 2026 [ PART ONE — PLAIN LANGUAGE ] The Felt Problem Your computer is supposed to work for you. That used to be obvious. You bought the machine, you owned what ran on it, and what happened inside that box stayed inside that box. Somewhere along the way, quietly, that stopped being t

A South Dakota autodidact asks a fundamental question about the nature of time, causality, and quantum mechanics — and builds a formal framework to answer it. An introduction to the Temporal Node Architecture (TNA).